The Last Night Page 2

  Soon the calm would be disrupted. Patricia, chatty and indomitable, would sweep in, indignant about something, declaring war on the postman for having left a parcel in the porch, on her sister for having forgotten her birthday. The sign would be flipped, the bell would ring out and the mutterings and pleasantries from the shop would clash and hum in the air as Irina worked silently next door.

  For now though this was her time to be still. She admired a recent piece she’d acquired from Ardingly market, a large, French, crested, gilt mirror, propped up against the tiled fireplace. Her face was just visible in it, peeking out over the counter, her blonde hair darker in this light, her skin waxy and pale. She blinked once, bringing the rest of the shop back into focus and turned to the computer screen.

  There was an email from one of her regulars. A contact in New York who’d just purchased a property somewhere in the West Country and had sent her a few items over the years. The email told her to expect a large delivery later that week and to invoice him for the work. He never asked her for a quote before a job, trusting her to be fair, perhaps. He signed off as he always did, with warmest regards. She gave a small smile at the screen, her curiosity piqued as to the nature of the delivery. He was normally more specific in his emails, the tone of this one was even vaguer than usual.

  The sound of a key turning in the lock and Irina found herself swivelling towards it, one hand automatically moving to her cheek, feeling the ridges beneath. Patricia bundled in, pulling out her key with a gloved hand and muttering something at the lock. When she looked up she jumped a fraction, startled perhaps to see Irina there, the feather in her hat quivering with the movement.

  ‘Oh now,’ she gasped.

  She switched on the light and the room transformed from a wash of greys to a warm yellow, light seeking out the corners, highlighting the ceramic figurines, reflecting off the glass doors of the mahogany cabinet and making Irina blink again. She stood up from the stool she’d been perching on, ready to escape to the workshop.

  ‘That’s better,’ Patricia said, shrugging off her coat and moving past the wooden trunks and tables loaded with fraying lace covers, tattered books on their surfaces, to hook it on the hat stand behind the counter. ‘Isn’t that better?’ she remarked to Irina, giving her a smile, the gap between her middle teeth prominent.

  ‘Much,’ Irina said, busying herself with clearing away her paper, pen and coffee cup.

  ‘You and your drawings,’ Patricia remarked, taking in the doodle. ‘Talented,’ she said, patting Irina on the arm, eyes flicking to the side of Irina’s face before sliding away as if they shouldn’t linger.

  Irina looked down, a curtain of hair falling over her cheek. Always aware.

  ‘I think my granddaughter is going to be an artist too.’

  ‘Patricia, she’s two.’

  ‘I can tell. Right, I’ll get the kettle on and bring you something through to the back,’ Patricia called out, moving through the shop with a duster on a stick, straightening a lampshade as she passed, clicking her tongue in satisfaction.

  Irina had been dismissed. The shop was Patricia’s domain; it smelt of beeswax and her rosewater scent and she kept it in jumbled order.

  Irina smiled at her back as she stretched up to reach the corner. ‘Thanks, Patricia,’ she said and moved towards the beaded-curtain door to the workshop. She caught sight of herself again as she walked past the mirror. She was close enough now to see the damage to her face. With the light overhead and the mirror at an angle it seemed worse somehow, the scar shadowed and livid red against the paleness of her skin. She automatically covered it with her hand, pushing through the curtain with the other, letting the beads fall behind her. She wouldn’t think about it today, she would focus only on the here and now.

  ABIGAIL

  ‘Mum!’ Abigail called out as she pushed her way through their front door and down the hallway, poking her head into the sitting room, the velvet sofa bare, and then on into the kitchen. ‘Ma!’ she called over her shoulder, smiling at the shopping list left out from the day before. Her mum often left a list in her careful, rounded hand. Old lists were scratched out in pencil with new ones to the side and below; she was not yet used to the end of paper rationing. Her mum still reused everything, assembling the week’s food scraps into a casserole – there was always a pot of bones on the boil for a soup – turning up clothes, darning socks. During wartime others had complained about the limited food but her mum had managed to turn most things into a decent meal. Abigail felt a spark of guilt for not doing more for her. She would make some exceptional sandwiches.

  ‘Mum…’ Abigail walked to the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the banister. ‘I’m putting a pot on.’

  They’d got so used to tea, they were now completely hooked on it. Her mum had gone for years without coffee and Abigail had always found the smell more enticing than the taste. They began most days with a pot of tea, only usually it was Abigail up last, yawning in the doorway of the kitchen, hair sticking up so her mum fussed and told her she’d never find a husband if she didn’t use a comb.

  ‘I don’t want a man who wants me with combed hair,’ she’d say, throwing her arms out wide and making her mum laugh: a quick set of snuffles and an admonishing ‘Abigail’ as Abigail danced around the kitchen holding her hair up at the ends. ‘He will love me for who I am, combed or uncombed.’

  ‘Honestly!’

  Abigail walked back into the hallway to glance at the grandfather clock they’d inherited a couple of years before from a great-aunt she’d never met. They were due to set off for Bath in less than half an hour.

  Returning to the kitchen, she searched the larder for the tinned meat and thought about starting on their sandwiches. The hamper sat open on the kitchen table: a couple of apples, two bottles of ginger beer, a pork pie wrapped in brown paper. They’d eat their picnic in Royal Victoria Park and throw the crusts to the ducks that were better fed than half of Europe. Abigail had been saving up for months and Bath seemed the ideal place to search for a dress. She was desperate to finally own something new. Her mum’s friend, Mrs Hoxley, had offered to take them both in the back of her motor car. Mrs Hoxley didn’t feel right driving with just her husband, she was only happy when they weren’t being wasteful, and Abigail’s mum had been quick to say yes. She adored the grand, sandblasted, Georgian buildings set out in sweeping crescents of neat, uniform terraces. She had been terribly upset to hear that two of them had been gutted in the Bath Blitz.

  Abigail walked up the stairs frowning. It wasn’t like her mum to ignore her. Maybe she was up in the attic sorting something or bent over more mending and couldn’t hear her. She wavered for a second, briefly remembering being a child and standing outside her parents’ bedroom door after a nightmare. They would throw the covers back and let her crawl in next to them, shushing her back to sleep, cocooned by her pyjama-clad father and snatching a handful of her mum’s cotton nightie.

  ‘You call me a lazybones,’ she said, knocking once before turning the doorknob and stepping inside. The darkness made her put her hands on her hips ready to waggle a finger in admonishment. ‘Still in bed, Your Majesty.’ She lowered her arms slowly, her sentence fading away.

  Even with the curtains closed she could see her mum’s inert body; something different about it. She wasn’t lying on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek, she was lying on her back. The room was sepia-coloured; the morning light filtered through the closed curtains, seeking gaps in the material, turning her mum’s face and arms a shade of orange. The room was still, utterly silent except for Abigail’s quickening breaths as she took in the scene. Her mum’s eyes were open and as Abigail moved forward, her brain seeing but not registering, she wondered whether her mum might suddenly move, whether her chest might rise and fall, her lips start to speak even though they remained frozen in her pale face.

  She reached an arm out to touch
her, flinching as she felt the cool flesh, unmoving. Her mum continued looking up at the ceiling as if examining a spot on the plaster. Abigail followed her stare, dumb and motionless by the side of the bed.

  ‘I was making a pot,’ she said, her voice seeming to bounce round the four small walls and hit straight back at her. Her mum’s eyes were still staring at the ceiling. Abigail knew she should try to close them, she didn’t like the glassy nothingness, her mum gone, somewhere else now but not behind those eyes.

  She backed away, leaving the room without opening the curtains, clattering down the staircase and along the hallway, exploding out into the street. The daylight was a shock, the street in technicolour, the sky too blue, the clouds too white, the redbrick of the houses around her startling. She panted on the steps of the house, whirling left and right for help, for something.

  Two women chatting, one pushing a large navy pram on the other side of the road, looked up. A gloved hand pointed to her standing there, another hand redirected the pram. They started to cross the road. Their faces were filled with questions, one of them was asking her something. She couldn’t hear exactly what. She felt the tears that were falling without restraint and her voice came as if from far away. ‘My mum, she’s… I found her… She’s…’

  She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She wanted to turn straight round, shut the front door, call her mum down for tea and hear a response, as if the last few minutes had happened in an alternative world, to another version of themselves.

  One of the women came towards her. Abigail could see her mouth moving a few seconds before she heard the words penetrate her head. ‘Do you need us to get help?’

  ‘No, she can’t… She’s dead.’

  The woman sucked air through her teeth as Abigail collapsed against her. ‘She’s dead. My mum’s dead.’

  They wouldn’t be going anywhere together today. They wouldn’t be going anywhere together anymore.

  IRINA

  When Patricia left for lunch every day, Irina was alone in the shop. With a weary gait she would emerge from the sanctuary of her workshop, the beads clacking behind her as she moved over to the till. The hour would be spent having to smile at people as they entered, answer any questions, explain the prices. Perched on the edge of the stool like a nervous bird about to take flight, she tried to avoid their gazes; she dreaded the moment when they would approach her, when they would notice. No words were ever spoken, perhaps a light cough into a hand, the stuttering of their first sentence as their tongue seemed too big for their mouth.

  Today was no different. Irina waited as a woman with tight blonde curls and bright pink glasses pottered through the shop, lifting pieces, examining them in the light from the window. The sun was now over the wall of Petworth House, casting rays into the shop that sliced through the air in speckled ribbons. Sniffing, the woman put down a ceramic leprechaun and drew a hand across the surface of an oak side table. She called something over her shoulder to Irina, who leant forward to answer.

  The woman repeated the question without looking up. ‘Have you noticed this?’ Her finger, bony and tipped with a thick, dark orange nail, pressed on the surface.

  Irina untangled her feet from the lower bar of the stool and moved across to see what the woman was pointing at. Her head was bowed and her pink glasses had slid to the end of her nose. Her finger was tracing a line in the wood, a hairline split in the grain. Irina bent forward to examine it and in that moment the woman looked sideways. The whole of Irina’s face was highlighted, damaged and shocking in the daylight. Irina felt the woman suck in all her breath; there was a tiny whistle of her teeth and a step backwards.

  Irina gabbled the explanation. ‘I refinished the top, trying to get the colour as close to the original stain, but you don’t want to make it entirely perfect…’ The woman wasn’t listening but tried to nod at the facts, the shake of her head coming a second too late. Irina’s hands were clammy, her throat dry; she trailed off as the woman smiled a thank you, effusive, her eyes crinkling and maximized by the lenses in the bright frames. Irina held her gaze, deliberately unwavering.

  Eventually Irina backed off to the stool, wanting the barrier of the counter between them, wondering why she felt upset. This was nothing new and yet today she felt fragile, tired of it all. The woman left the shop shortly afterwards with a hearty goodbye, the words filled with feeling. Irina raised a hand, the reply sticking. Then she was left alone again. The ticking of two clocks clashed in the air as she waited for Patricia to return so that she could escape.

  ABIGAIL

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Mary said tearfully. They were going round in circles.

  It had been a couple of hours since they’d watched Abigail’s mum being lowered into the ground. They were dressed in identical black, the woollen material sticking to them, too hot for the unseasonably warm spring day. Their abandoned pillbox hats with squares of veil were lying on the grass between them, their flattened hair as lank as the mood of the day.

  ‘But your work…’

  Abigail was biting on her lip. Since her mum had died she’d felt eerily removed from things, as if she were floating above her own life, watching it unfold. She kept walking into rooms and expecting her mum to be there, kept answering the door to people thinking they were her. Imagined her popping in, pulling up a chair. ‘Silly you! I was here all the time.’ People came with casseroles and pitying looks and Abigail had to keep the kettle on the boil so that the permanent scream from the escaping steam sounded exactly like the noise in her head.

  ‘Maybe they’ll have something for me there?’

  ‘But where would you live?’ Abigail knew she wasn’t helping but she felt a brittleness about it all. Her mum had died. She was leaving. This life was over, a full stop, a very definite end. As if the past had a large line drawn next to it and she could never cross back.

  That was the past in which she and Mary had discussed their futures in light-hearted voices, sipping cider for the first time, patching clothes, drawing lines on their legs to pretend they were wearing nylons. They were going to find work as secretaries, travel, marry American lads, or not. Mary admitted to Abigail once that she didn’t much fancy working for a man at home as well as working outside. Abigail wanted to be in love though, wanted to be kissed, head tilted backwards, by a wavy-haired man like Marlon Brando. That was before, when she’d felt something. Now she would do anything to be able to stay living with her mum, looking after her, bringing her cups of sweet tea and reading to her, remaining an old maid; anything to cross that line back into the past.

  They were leaning against the Clifton Downs tower, their heads resting on the stonework, both hopelessly lost in the misery of the moment, the spring sunshine, the hopeful blossom on the trees, the clumps of waving daffodils incongruous with their mood.

  ‘You can’t go,’ Mary said simply.

  Abigail wanted to bundle her friend into her arms and never let go but, again, she saw her as if through a thick lens, as if she had put on someone’s spectacles, so that everything was squiffy and blurry. She didn’t want to leave, she knew that much; she didn’t want to be alone. But the house was only rented – her mum had taken in mending from a lot of the grand houses in Clifton, working at it day in, day out until the light failed – and now the landlord’s patience was waning and Abigail knew she had to go.

  She was headed to Devon, to a sister she hadn’t seen since long before the war, who had married in a church in Aspley Road when Abigail was wearing frocks, pulled-up socks and sandals, and pigtails in her hair. Her sister hadn’t made the funeral, had sent a vast arrangement of flowers for the coffin and her apologies that ‘family circumstances’ prevented her from attending. Abigail had been too swept up in everything else at the time to react but now it made her fists clench. How could her sister have stayed away?

  She had distant memories of her sister as a child. She
’d had a line of three china dolls, all dressed in velvet and with cherubic cheeks and beady eyes, sitting on a trunk at the foot of the bed. She had been sent to her room once when she had stamped her foot at their daddy. She had loved drawing, producing neat pictures with all the colour inside the lines, not like Abigail’s, a mad mess of scrawls and mismatched shades. She had pinched her: that Abigail remembered.

  They were older now though and she would have changed. She wouldn’t be the girl who had locked her in the outside lavatory for the longest afternoon in winter so that Abigail had clawed at the wooden boards and got splinters in her fingers; or the girl who had shown her how to put on lipstick, creeping into their mum’s room to prance and preen in the mirror, giggling and slopping around in high-heeled shoes that were much too big.

  When she made herself, Abigail could picture them both picking their way carefully across the fields of north Devon, heads bent together, laughing. Then that scene would melt away, replaced by a blank face on a body she didn’t recognize. A hard woman with thin lips, glaring at Abigail through narrowed eyes, wondering why Abigail was there. Abigail shook her head to get rid of the image. The picture postcards her sister sent promised sunny days, promenading in hats, ice-creams, open space. She felt lighter at the thought then, wanting to convince herself, needing the comfort of family, needing something on this earth of her mum. They would cling to each other and cry and Abigail would feel something again.

  Abigail wanted to believe she wouldn’t miss the bustle and dirt of Bristol, wouldn’t miss picking up Mary from her shift at the pub, the thrill of walking into the cramped, low-ceilinged room hung about with pots. The sweaty, heaving mass as she pushed past men holding tankards of ale; the toothy grins of the regulars as they beckoned her over to the tables where they sat on upturned barrels and chairs drinking thick cider, the dregs creeping up the sides of their glasses. The room smelling of tobacco and the sweet tang of apples. The heat all around her, hemming her in, caressing her, leaving patches under her arms, trickles down her back. The walk back along the river to Mary’s house, the boats gently rocking, the cranes reaching over the surface of the water, the steam trains hissing in the station. Clifton overlooking it all in its glorious pomp: manicured lawns, sloping roads lined with impressive stone houses behind high walls and heavy gates. Bristol seemed greyer now, a body without its heart: no reason to stay.